I'm in the same boat - head bashing against a desk at least once a day.
I don't understand why MS bothers with some features or bothers changing how they work from previous versions. I've had to re-install Word 2000 for so many people because they hate how the mail merge functions were changed in 2003 - as far as I can tell the functionality is the same, it's just how it's presented to the user confuses everyone. Office programs aren't hard to use for basic functions like creating a simple document, for more advanced features they are often bizzare in how they behave - too many functions are buried deep inside 4 layers of choices and use confusing terminology. For most users most of the time something simple like AbiWord would be fine. Office2k3 does seem to be a step forward from 2000, but it's also a huge step sideways (which we really didn't need). I'd like to see some kind of a "mode switch" in ALL office apps - basic-functions-that-everyone-uses-mode in which it does all the commonly used functions with super straightforward menus the easy day to day stuff and don't-call-tech-support-you-should-of-attended-tra ining-mode in which it behaves how it does now (with the addition of more wizards, they really do help).
On the subject of badly designed crap - Entourage (MS's post-Outlook mail client for Macs) is such shit. It's buggy as all hell and is too different for most users - it sucks being forced to support it. I've wasted hours of my life wrestling with it.
Also, track changes is so fucked up I don't understand why anyone bothers. The best is track changes on the latest Mac version of Word (2004?). It seems like track changes is different in every single version of Word.
One more final thing - we are just now starting to roll out SP2. We started rolling out XP last year. We FINALlY ended 9x support last month. We started rolling out Office 2003 earlier this year.
I use it every day at work - it's great for tracking down random missing files (which I have to do frequently unfortunately), keeping track of notes and to-do stuff (which I do all day long), and it provides an easy way to scan the news and monitor the weather (I have no windows so I'm never sure if I need to bring my jacket when I take my break) without having to be obvious about it (don't want to give the wrong impression that I'm slacking). If you have to use multiple email accounts at the same time it's great to be able to see all your new emails in a single place - I have 3 seperate accounts that receive work related emails - often they show up in the google sidebar before they do in Outlook and since it reads gmail too I can monitor my personal account from it also. I also use a system monitoring plug-in to keep track of performance on my machine when I'm testing software out, that's less frequent though. If you set the sidebar to autohide it really takes up no screen real estate unless you actually need it. Oh, and the email search function is 1000x better than Outlooks (which sucks unless you do "advanced" and then it's still slow as all hell) - I use it to search my email all the time - one of the reasons I kept it after first installing it (and not being very impressed initially) is that Outlook's search function couldn't find an email I knew I had sent, I spent 10 minutes trying to track it down - the Google search found it in seconds - any program which saves my ass is going to get a thorough evaluation from me.
I have an MX1000 and it is the greatest mouse I've ever used. I use it in games all the time without problem. Also, it's cheaper than this "gaming mouse" and it doesn't run on 2.4ghz so no worries about it messing with my WAP. So, why pay more for this mouse when you can get the MX1000?
Saddam invaded Kuwait because they had a dispute over the legality of slant drilling along the border area between the two countries. Iraq alleged that Kuwait was tapping into Iraqi oil fields. There were some other arguments about whether Kuwait had any kind of a historical claim to being a nation-state or whether it was in fact part of Iraq - I don't remember the specifics. I'm not saying either of these things were true or genuinely do justify the Iraqi invasion, just that Iraq did justify the invasion with claims that have succesfully been used to justify previous invasions in other parts of the world.
I'm about 2/3 into Century Rain right now and it's blowing me away, definitely one of Reynolds best. There is a great slashdot reference in there too, it's subtle enough that you won't get it unless you know of slashdot. Reynolds, MacLeod, Stross, Morgan - they four of the best SF writers around these days, and all of them have referened Slashdot... it must be a sign.
I have a MX1000 and use a similiar config as you in FPS games. You can re-program the mouse buttons if you want using the drivers, there is also a dedicated program for creating different profiles for different games but I can't remember what it's called at the moment. I have never noticed any problems pressing two buttons at once, you need to press two buttons in KOTOR2 and it works without a problem.
What problems have you had? I've had Vonage for a few months now and haven't had anything go wrong at all. I can game online while the phone is in use and there is no effect on my ping.
Also, Vonage is coming out with a wifi-based phone sometime soon - it's in testing right now. Once that comes out you should be able to hop onto any open wireless and have your home phone. There is no doubt devices like that will be the future with wifi saturating everything.
I could be misremembering, what kind of tasks were you using it for? For me it was all games and I had a dual voodoo2 set-up - the FPS I got were comparable to everyone I knew running a P2.
From what I remember the original celerons were with in a few percentage points of the P2 in every single benchmark except for "office producivity" apps - i.e. they choked on crap like Word and Excel. Besides that they were comparable. For my purposes at the time that meant playing games, a few fps difference wasn't worth the several hundred dollars more for a "real" pentium. I had a 266 original celeron clocked up to 450 with dual voodoo2's in it - it ran within a few fps of the same system running a p2. I've still got all that gear laying around, I'm almost tempted to throw it back together and relive the glory days of quake1...
I remember those original celerons, they ran at 266mhz but without the L2 you could clock them up to 450mhz with no problem in even the crappiest of systems, and at that time the fastest P2 was a 400mhz (if I remember correctly). Performance-wise it would actually perform the same as an equally clocked p2 in almost all apps, particularly in games.
Later they released the Celeron-A which was a P2 with the L2 cache actually incorporated into the die - so it ran at the same speed. It was only like 128k, but still - if you got a good chip (and later in the run most were good) you could OC like mad and actually out-perform an equally clocked pentium with external L2. The thing is the most any of these celerons ever cost was around $90 or so, compared to $300+ for the crap named "Pentium".
I've been shopping there since around 1998, never had any problems. I prefer newegg, but often you can find a few items at mwave for cheaper so you can save $30 or by splitting your purchase between the two (assuming you are buying a lot of parts at once). For small items I've tried a few other stores over the years, never had as professional of service as I have from mwave and newegg - either it takes an unusual amount of time to process the order, or it doesn't ship when they claim it will or the packaging is substandard, etc.
Another one is bzboyz.com, they often have really good prices - especially on video cards and CPUs, but the one time I ordered from them they were conventiently out of stock even though their website said they were. It took an extra week for my order to ship. I didn't care much at the time, but it's BS to say you have a part when you don't and to not tell the customer until AFTER they order. I'd deal with them again for anything non-urgent if the price was right.
Back in HS we had Win3.11 boxes locked down with the stupidest security software ever. The only thing you could use was Notepad and the crappy applications you were supposed to be using (which was really just a typing tutor thing that couldn't even keep up with you if you could type over 70wpm). I hacked that stupid security program using Notepad every single day and then put it back together before class ended. I did forget a few time but the admin was too stupid to figure out how I did it and couldn't prove anything ("I dunno, it broke?"). Of course this was pre-Columbine and the militarization of schools...
I have a friend of a friend who got hired there, you couldn't pay me to trust him to touch any computer I had to deal with. Geek Squad is overpriced and seems to have stupid hiring practices. A friend of mine applied there and didn't even get an interview but he's one of the best technicians I've ever met and has great customer service skills.
I do tech support professionally on a college campus and freelance for anyone recommended to me by friends. I hate freelancing because tech support crap is almost always boring and I already do it all day long, but it's hard to turn down extra income. I started out charging $20 an hour, now I'm up to $50 (for on-site calls). I always feel really guilty charging that much though (unless it's a nasty spyware infection). This one time I worked on this guys computer that had had the wireless card disabled - I literally just had to click "enable" and I was done. It took 5 minutes to drive to his house, 5 minutes to get situated with the computer booted up and all that, and then I was done. I told him because it took such a short amount of time I would only charge him $10, he was cool and joked that he pays the kid down the street more to mow his lawn and ended up paying me $30. I still felt bad - clearly I'm not cut out for this kind of work.
Right now I'm working on a PC in exchange for free food, mostly because it's a new customer and I know she is a good cook, but also because all I have to do is swap a CD-ROM drive and troubleshoot a Wacom tablet. I feel like an ass charging for simple things like that.
I'm in the same boat where I work. I'm trying to get Firefox officially supported, the biggest sticking point is the lack of an easy method to push updates. I think this is one of the biggest reasons Firefox isn't widely deployed in the corporate environment yet, sure it's easy to install it yourself and update it yourself - but that's not a solution in a controlled environment.
Have you ever actually tried to do this though? It takes a lot of hacking of netreg to pull off. The place I used to work tried to pull this off, we had it working for about 3 months fairly well before it feel apart. Basically, Netreg is designed to have two classifications - registered and unregistered, it's not designed to have 3 classes (i.e. + infected).
I used to work in a similiar environment. We set up Netreg - unregistered machines can only access a website with a form explaining the terms of use and with links to AV software and patches. By clicking on the agreement they consent to having their port disabled if they are found to be in violation of the policy (i.e. if they are flooding the network/spreading viruses). We set up Netdisco (http://netdisco.org/) to handle the actual disabling of ports. For awhile we had 3 categories in Netreg, unregistered, registered, and infected. We would move people found to be infected into the infected category which put them on their own restricted subdomain that could only access a "YOU ARE INFECTED" page with cleaning tools and info on how to get help from us, but it was a nasty cludge of a hack in Netreg to make this work and we ended up giving up on doing it this way after having lots of problems with it and ended just using Netdisco to disable them.
It's not the perfect solution but it did a fair job while I worked there.
I've been a Netflix subscriber for about a year now, prior to that I got all my movies from Blockbuster. I still rent from Blockbuster on occasion, primarily when there is no other choice - i.e. if someone is over and we spur of the moment decide we want to watch a very specific movie that we don't have. With Netflix my wife and I just queue up movies whenever we think of them and then adjust their order when we feel like watching something specific. We have about 100 movies in our queue right now, we add more every few weeks. We have always gotten the movie we wanted when we wanted. We always get our movies quickly, about 3 months ago it went from an average of 3 days down to an average of 2 days between the time the mailman picks up a movie to the time he brings a new one.
With Blockbuster we always forget to return movies, they've claimed we have not returned movies that we have (twice this has happened!). Half the time they don't have the movie we want, and their movies are NEVER IN ORDER. The staff is often rude, slow, unhelpful, or annoying. There are always lines and screaming kids, and idiots who insist on writing a check and then take 15 minutes to do it, etc. I dread going to Blockbuster.
Netflix is 100x better than Blockbuster - whenever I feel like it I can search for what movies I want, read reviews on them, I can always find really obscure movies, and there lots of TV series you'll never find in Blockbuster (like seemeingly anything good ever made for the BBC). I really don't understand how Blockbuster stays in business, the only thing they have going for them is the immediacy of picking out a movie and having it. I'm not that impulsive though so Netflix is perfect. Compared to how much money we used to spend renting movies Netflix is a really good deal. I would be very suprised if they didn't survive as a business, they offer a great service at a fair price - I think it's just that it's still new to a lot of people so it hasn't caught in a lot of places.
I never watched Firefly when it was on TV but had heard so many good things about it I ordered it via Netflix. I still can't believe they cancelled that show, it was by far one of the best shows ever on TV. My wife, who isn't normally into scifi even got into it - I made her watch the first disk and she was hooked.
The movie looks awesome, from the trailer it looks like it will rehash some of the main plot from the TV series but the fact that the movie was even made is enough to set aside my complaints. Hopefully it does well enough to get some sequels made or perhaps even the series revived on TV.
I think The Scar is his best work, PSS was interesting but it felt like the plot ground to a halt occasionally, and sometimes he just got a little too carried away with certain details. The Scar felt much tighter and moved along at a good pace.
Interesting that a book not even for sale in America was nominated. It's also interesting that the best contemporary SF is coming out of the UK these days. I hate it though because for most of these great authors you have to wait a year+ for their books to get released in the US (unless you want to go through the hassle of Amazon.co.uk. I think Ken MacLeod and Charlie Stross are the only exceptions to this in that they get published in the US first or within a month or so of coming out in the eU...but Richard Morgan, Alastair Reynolds, Ian Banks, etc... they come out at least a year earlier in the UK and then when they are released in the US you can never find them in any local bookstore - you have to order online. Why is it so hard to release a book simultaneously around the world? They're in the same damn language. Additionally, why do bookstores insist on carrying so much BAD SF. You can find 100 different books by L.Ron Hubbard, but not a single copy of anything by Alastair Reynolds. I enjoyed LOTR when I first read it, but do they really need an entire bookshelf full of 5 different editions of each book and a dozen other books analysing each book or character or whatever? Do they really need to carry everything Asimov or Clarke ever published? Do they really need to carry 5 copies each of book 1 through 57 of Wheel of Time? The SF section in bookstores is already so tiny and filled with way too much crappy fantasy, why do they cary so much shit when there is so much good SF around? I've been in several bookstores over the past few weeks - not a single copy of Ilium by Dan Simmons, not a single copy of Cassini Division by Ken MacLeod, not a single copy of The Family Trade by Charlie Stross, etc..... It just doesn't make any sense at all.
I run an open access point, I password protected the config interface and check occasionally to see if anyone is using it - but really I don't care. I always have enough bandwidth when I need it, so why not share? If anyone uses it for something illegal I know I can't be held liable and I don't have any logs of what goes on with it, maybe someday I'll get hassled by the cops or the MPAA, but I'll deal with that if it ever comes.
I'm in the same boat. I'm working as part-time temp. doing IT (web interface to a SQL database & helping with a transition to a new semi-custom application used to run a department)while I go to school part time earning my Masters (in something completely unrelated to IT). I have the time to work full-time but because of my age (I'm 25 but look younger) and the way the labor market is right now I can't get a job. I've been "second choice" twice now, one time the people on the hiring committee all but told me I was hired, then I came in to meet the woman who would supervise me - she made a comment about how young I was to be working there (everyone else looked 35+) and seemed weirded out that I was "just a kid", needless to say I did not get the job. I'd be happy with a low-end job that paid less than $30k a year doing grunt level tech support but I can't even get that, despite working thru my undergrad doing exactly that. Ultimately, I'm trying to extricate myself from working directly with IT but I'm good at frontline tech support so it's where I've got to find a job for now. I want a "real" job that pays a fair wage but they just aren't out there so I'm stuck part-time with a low wage that wouldn't fly if I were anything other than a temp.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in the same boat - head bashing against a desk at least once a day.
a ining-mode in which it behaves how it does now (with the addition of more wizards, they really do help).
I don't understand why MS bothers with some features or bothers changing how they work from previous versions. I've had to re-install Word 2000 for so many people because they hate how the mail merge functions were changed in 2003 - as far as I can tell the functionality is the same, it's just how it's presented to the user confuses everyone. Office programs aren't hard to use for basic functions like creating a simple document, for more advanced features they are often bizzare in how they behave - too many functions are buried deep inside 4 layers of choices and use confusing terminology. For most users most of the time something simple like AbiWord would be fine. Office2k3 does seem to be a step forward from 2000, but it's also a huge step sideways (which we really didn't need). I'd like to see some kind of a "mode switch" in ALL office apps - basic-functions-that-everyone-uses-mode in which it does all the commonly used functions with super straightforward menus the easy day to day stuff and don't-call-tech-support-you-should-of-attended-tr
On the subject of badly designed crap - Entourage (MS's post-Outlook mail client for Macs) is such shit. It's buggy as all hell and is too different for most users - it sucks being forced to support it. I've wasted hours of my life wrestling with it.
Also, track changes is so fucked up I don't understand why anyone bothers. The best is track changes on the latest Mac version of Word (2004?). It seems like track changes is different in every single version of Word.
One more final thing - we are just now starting to roll out SP2. We started rolling out XP last year. We FINALlY ended 9x support last month. We started rolling out Office 2003 earlier this year.
I use it every day at work - it's great for tracking down random missing files (which I have to do frequently unfortunately), keeping track of notes and to-do stuff (which I do all day long), and it provides an easy way to scan the news and monitor the weather (I have no windows so I'm never sure if I need to bring my jacket when I take my break) without having to be obvious about it (don't want to give the wrong impression that I'm slacking). If you have to use multiple email accounts at the same time it's great to be able to see all your new emails in a single place - I have 3 seperate accounts that receive work related emails - often they show up in the google sidebar before they do in Outlook and since it reads gmail too I can monitor my personal account from it also. I also use a system monitoring plug-in to keep track of performance on my machine when I'm testing software out, that's less frequent though. If you set the sidebar to autohide it really takes up no screen real estate unless you actually need it. Oh, and the email search function is 1000x better than Outlooks (which sucks unless you do "advanced" and then it's still slow as all hell) - I use it to search my email all the time - one of the reasons I kept it after first installing it (and not being very impressed initially) is that Outlook's search function couldn't find an email I knew I had sent, I spent 10 minutes trying to track it down - the Google search found it in seconds - any program which saves my ass is going to get a thorough evaluation from me.
I have an MX1000 and it is the greatest mouse I've ever used. I use it in games all the time without problem. Also, it's cheaper than this "gaming mouse" and it doesn't run on 2.4ghz so no worries about it messing with my WAP. So, why pay more for this mouse when you can get the MX1000?
Saddam invaded Kuwait because they had a dispute over the legality of slant drilling along the border area between the two countries. Iraq alleged that Kuwait was tapping into Iraqi oil fields. There were some other arguments about whether Kuwait had any kind of a historical claim to being a nation-state or whether it was in fact part of Iraq - I don't remember the specifics. I'm not saying either of these things were true or genuinely do justify the Iraqi invasion, just that Iraq did justify the invasion with claims that have succesfully been used to justify previous invasions in other parts of the world.
I'm about 2/3 into Century Rain right now and it's blowing me away, definitely one of Reynolds best. There is a great slashdot reference in there too, it's subtle enough that you won't get it unless you know of slashdot. Reynolds, MacLeod, Stross, Morgan - they four of the best SF writers around these days, and all of them have referened Slashdot... it must be a sign.
I have a MX1000 and use a similiar config as you in FPS games. You can re-program the mouse buttons if you want using the drivers, there is also a dedicated program for creating different profiles for different games but I can't remember what it's called at the moment.
I have never noticed any problems pressing two buttons at once, you need to press two buttons in KOTOR2 and it works without a problem.
What problems have you had? I've had Vonage for a few months now and haven't had anything go wrong at all. I can game online while the phone is in use and there is no effect on my ping.
Also, Vonage is coming out with a wifi-based phone sometime soon - it's in testing right now. Once that comes out you should be able to hop onto any open wireless and have your home phone. There is no doubt devices like that will be the future with wifi saturating everything.
I could be misremembering, what kind of tasks were you using it for? For me it was all games and I had a dual voodoo2 set-up - the FPS I got were comparable to everyone I knew running a P2.
From what I remember the original celerons were with in a few percentage points of the P2 in every single benchmark except for "office producivity" apps - i.e. they choked on crap like Word and Excel. Besides that they were comparable. For my purposes at the time that meant playing games, a few fps difference wasn't worth the several hundred dollars more for a "real" pentium. I had a 266 original celeron clocked up to 450 with dual voodoo2's in it - it ran within a few fps of the same system running a p2. I've still got all that gear laying around, I'm almost tempted to throw it back together and relive the glory days of quake1...
I remember those original celerons, they ran at 266mhz but without the L2 you could clock them up to 450mhz with no problem in even the crappiest of systems, and at that time the fastest P2 was a 400mhz (if I remember correctly). Performance-wise it would actually perform the same as an equally clocked p2 in almost all apps, particularly in games.
Later they released the Celeron-A which was a P2 with the L2 cache actually incorporated into the die - so it ran at the same speed. It was only like 128k, but still - if you got a good chip (and later in the run most were good) you could OC like mad and actually out-perform an equally clocked pentium with external L2. The thing is the most any of these celerons ever cost was around $90 or so, compared to $300+ for the crap named "Pentium".
I've been shopping there since around 1998, never had any problems. I prefer newegg, but often you can find a few items at mwave for cheaper so you can save $30 or by splitting your purchase between the two (assuming you are buying a lot of parts at once). For small items I've tried a few other stores over the years, never had as professional of service as I have from mwave and newegg - either it takes an unusual amount of time to process the order, or it doesn't ship when they claim it will or the packaging is substandard, etc.
Another one is bzboyz.com, they often have really good prices - especially on video cards and CPUs, but the one time I ordered from them they were conventiently out of stock even though their website said they were. It took an extra week for my order to ship. I didn't care much at the time, but it's BS to say you have a part when you don't and to not tell the customer until AFTER they order. I'd deal with them again for anything non-urgent if the price was right.
Back in HS we had Win3.11 boxes locked down with the stupidest security software ever. The only thing you could use was Notepad and the crappy applications you were supposed to be using (which was really just a typing tutor thing that couldn't even keep up with you if you could type over 70wpm). I hacked that stupid security program using Notepad every single day and then put it back together before class ended. I did forget a few time but the admin was too stupid to figure out how I did it and couldn't prove anything ("I dunno, it broke?"). Of course this was pre-Columbine and the militarization of schools...
I have a friend of a friend who got hired there, you couldn't pay me to trust him to touch any computer I had to deal with. Geek Squad is overpriced and seems to have stupid hiring practices. A friend of mine applied there and didn't even get an interview but he's one of the best technicians I've ever met and has great customer service skills.
I do tech support professionally on a college campus and freelance for anyone recommended to me by friends. I hate freelancing because tech support crap is almost always boring and I already do it all day long, but it's hard to turn down extra income. I started out charging $20 an hour, now I'm up to $50 (for on-site calls). I always feel really guilty charging that much though (unless it's a nasty spyware infection). This one time I worked on this guys computer that had had the wireless card disabled - I literally just had to click "enable" and I was done. It took 5 minutes to drive to his house, 5 minutes to get situated with the computer booted up and all that, and then I was done. I told him because it took such a short amount of time I would only charge him $10, he was cool and joked that he pays the kid down the street more to mow his lawn and ended up paying me $30. I still felt bad - clearly I'm not cut out for this kind of work.
Right now I'm working on a PC in exchange for free food, mostly because it's a new customer and I know she is a good cook, but also because all I have to do is swap a CD-ROM drive and troubleshoot a Wacom tablet. I feel like an ass charging for simple things like that.
I'm in the same boat where I work. I'm trying to get Firefox officially supported, the biggest sticking point is the lack of an easy method to push updates. I think this is one of the biggest reasons Firefox isn't widely deployed in the corporate environment yet, sure it's easy to install it yourself and update it yourself - but that's not a solution in a controlled environment.
Have you ever actually tried to do this though? It takes a lot of hacking of netreg to pull off. The place I used to work tried to pull this off, we had it working for about 3 months fairly well before it feel apart. Basically, Netreg is designed to have two classifications - registered and unregistered, it's not designed to have 3 classes (i.e. + infected).
I forgot to mention, we used ettercap to detect attacks.
Ettercap:
http://ettercap.sourceforge.net/
Netreg:
http://www.netreg.org/
Netdisco:
http://netdisco.org/
I used to work in a similiar environment. We set up Netreg - unregistered machines can only access a website with a form explaining the terms of use and with links to AV software and patches. By clicking on the agreement they consent to having their port disabled if they are found to be in violation of the policy (i.e. if they are flooding the network/spreading viruses). We set up Netdisco (http://netdisco.org/) to handle the actual disabling of ports. For awhile we had 3 categories in Netreg, unregistered, registered, and infected. We would move people found to be infected into the infected category which put them on their own restricted subdomain that could only access a "YOU ARE INFECTED" page with cleaning tools and info on how to get help from us, but it was a nasty cludge of a hack in Netreg to make this work and we ended up giving up on doing it this way after having lots of problems with it and ended just using Netdisco to disable them.
It's not the perfect solution but it did a fair job while I worked there.
Hmm, so is this prior art? Perhaps you can invalidate Google's patent...
I've been a Netflix subscriber for about a year now, prior to that I got all my movies from Blockbuster. I still rent from Blockbuster on occasion, primarily when there is no other choice - i.e. if someone is over and we spur of the moment decide we want to watch a very specific movie that we don't have. With Netflix my wife and I just queue up movies whenever we think of them and then adjust their order when we feel like watching something specific. We have about 100 movies in our queue right now, we add more every few weeks. We have always gotten the movie we wanted when we wanted. We always get our movies quickly, about 3 months ago it went from an average of 3 days down to an average of 2 days between the time the mailman picks up a movie to the time he brings a new one.
With Blockbuster we always forget to return movies, they've claimed we have not returned movies that we have (twice this has happened!). Half the time they don't have the movie we want, and their movies are NEVER IN ORDER. The staff is often rude, slow, unhelpful, or annoying. There are always lines and screaming kids, and idiots who insist on writing a check and then take 15 minutes to do it, etc. I dread going to Blockbuster.
Netflix is 100x better than Blockbuster - whenever I feel like it I can search for what movies I want, read reviews on them, I can always find really obscure movies, and there lots of TV series you'll never find in Blockbuster (like seemeingly anything good ever made for the BBC). I really don't understand how Blockbuster stays in business, the only thing they have going for them is the immediacy of picking out a movie and having it. I'm not that impulsive though so Netflix is perfect. Compared to how much money we used to spend renting movies Netflix is a really good deal. I would be very suprised if they didn't survive as a business, they offer a great service at a fair price - I think it's just that it's still new to a lot of people so it hasn't caught in a lot of places.
I never watched Firefly when it was on TV but had heard so many good things about it I ordered it via Netflix. I still can't believe they cancelled that show, it was by far one of the best shows ever on TV. My wife, who isn't normally into scifi even got into it - I made her watch the first disk and she was hooked.
The movie looks awesome, from the trailer it looks like it will rehash some of the main plot from the TV series but the fact that the movie was even made is enough to set aside my complaints. Hopefully it does well enough to get some sequels made or perhaps even the series revived on TV.
I think The Scar is his best work, PSS was interesting but it felt like the plot ground to a halt occasionally, and sometimes he just got a little too carried away with certain details. The Scar felt much tighter and moved along at a good pace.
Interesting that a book not even for sale in America was nominated. It's also interesting that the best contemporary SF is coming out of the UK these days. I hate it though because for most of these great authors you have to wait a year+ for their books to get released in the US (unless you want to go through the hassle of Amazon.co.uk. I think Ken MacLeod and Charlie Stross are the only exceptions to this in that they get published in the US first or within a month or so of coming out in the eU...but Richard Morgan, Alastair Reynolds, Ian Banks, etc... they come out at least a year earlier in the UK and then when they are released in the US you can never find them in any local bookstore - you have to order online. Why is it so hard to release a book simultaneously around the world? They're in the same damn language. Additionally, why do bookstores insist on carrying so much BAD SF. You can find 100 different books by L.Ron Hubbard, but not a single copy of anything by Alastair Reynolds. I enjoyed LOTR when I first read it, but do they really need an entire bookshelf full of 5 different editions of each book and a dozen other books analysing each book or character or whatever? Do they really need to carry everything Asimov or Clarke ever published? Do they really need to carry 5 copies each of book 1 through 57 of Wheel of Time? The SF section in bookstores is already so tiny and filled with way too much crappy fantasy, why do they cary so much shit when there is so much good SF around? I've been in several bookstores over the past few weeks - not a single copy of Ilium by Dan Simmons, not a single copy of Cassini Division by Ken MacLeod, not a single copy of The Family Trade by Charlie Stross, etc..... It just doesn't make any sense at all.
I run an open access point, I password protected the config interface and check occasionally to see if anyone is using it - but really I don't care. I always have enough bandwidth when I need it, so why not share? If anyone uses it for something illegal I know I can't be held liable and I don't have any logs of what goes on with it, maybe someday I'll get hassled by the cops or the MPAA, but I'll deal with that if it ever comes.
I'm in the same boat. I'm working as part-time temp. doing IT (web interface to a SQL database & helping with a transition to a new semi-custom application used to run a department)while I go to school part time earning my Masters (in something completely unrelated to IT). I have the time to work full-time but because of my age (I'm 25 but look younger) and the way the labor market is right now I can't get a job. I've been "second choice" twice now, one time the people on the hiring committee all but told me I was hired, then I came in to meet the woman who would supervise me - she made a comment about how young I was to be working there (everyone else looked 35+) and seemed weirded out that I was "just a kid", needless to say I did not get the job. I'd be happy with a low-end job that paid less than $30k a year doing grunt level tech support but I can't even get that, despite working thru my undergrad doing exactly that. Ultimately, I'm trying to extricate myself from working directly with IT but I'm good at frontline tech support so it's where I've got to find a job for now. I want a "real" job that pays a fair wage but they just aren't out there so I'm stuck part-time with a low wage that wouldn't fly if I were anything other than a temp.
The college I work for is listed in there unranked. It has 6 boxes with X's in them, 4 of those boxes are not correct.